Facts about using DP Live

[MIDI Life Crisis]

Nice to know I'm not the only one around here who still uses Plogue Bidule. Also great for running DP in 64 bit and accessing 32 bit AUs. jBridge can't do that as it is VST only.

I don't have a laptop so I don't have access to DP live for hosting. I hope to change that within the next performance cycle.

[Dwetmaster]

From what I can tell the only way I can see this working is by transposing notes you want the other synth/sample to use outside of the range of the instrument, which may work for some instruments, but not others. Would love to be wrong about this.

Well using the IAC Driver you can easily re-route a single MIDI channel to several MIDI channel. Then using the MIDI transpose plug with custom transpose maps you may be able to do what you want?

Would love NOT to be wrong about this

[Michael Canavan]

Just imagine Dave, if MOTU ever give the ability to restrain a MIDI track a limited range of notes, Chunks would allow you to blazingly fast call up new background audio tracks and MIDI lay outs for synths in a V-Rack so elegantly.

[dewdman42]

This is a great thread! You guys have opened my eyes to the possibility of using DP for live use.

Regarding the keyboard split/layering situation, here are some possible solutions, none of which I have tried, but just thinking aloud here.

First is a collection of free VST MIDI plugins. They are available for download and a forum to discuss their use is here:

http://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=148

In particular I notice on their list of plugins MidiKeySplit and MidiKeySplit4 (which is a 4 zone keyboard mapper).

The other options I can think of to enhance live use would be to use external MIDI processors, to put in between MIDI controller and DP, using IAC. MidiPipe has been around a long time. It can do a lot of stuff and its generally useful, but note that I don't think you could create different keyboard splits per "patch" that change on demand from a program change.

http://www.subtlesoft.square7.net/MidiPipe.html

Another one I found out about recently but haven't really tried yet, MIGHT be able to respond to program changes appropriately. Transmidifier.

http://www.bewaryprods.com/software/pro ... sMIDIfier/

For me, personally, I don't want to have to fiddle with a mouse or computer keyboard during a show, it has to be very hands off where I can send program change from the MIDI controller and it will just all work without having to use the actual GUI.

Some of the other products like Jambalaya, Cantabile and Forte are quite good in that dept and some even have full screen mode where only the setlist or lyrics are displayed on the screen, and stuff like that. I bought Mainstage yesterday at $29 and I'm not sorry, but after fooling around with it, I am sure it would not work for my purposes, I'd rather use DP then that beast.

[Kurt Cowling]

I'm curious about your response to Mainstage. Is it the UI that you don't like, or is there something you want it to do that it lacks? It took a bit for me to figure it out, but I find there's nothing it lacks from my point of view. I love the floating split points.

Please post if you have questions about it.

--Kurt

Ps I took a look at the Jambalya web site. The thing looks pretty garish and the most recent post on their forum was over 5 years ago. Not for me.

[dewdman42]

just a very early impression and I have to spend more time with it before I can say more than that.

Related to Jambayala, yes I don't like the color schemes either and also I agree the author is not very active on it, which could be a deal breaker for people who have not purchased it yet, including myself.

However that being said, it does a lot of the right stuff you need in a tool like this without a lot of complicated stuff.

Mainstage, I can't say whether it will work for me until I can setup set lists and scene changes and have it respond to program changes...and do so with minimal CPU usage and avoid having to reload samples when I change songs, etc. I don't want to have to touch the gui during a set.

In the past when I investigated Mainstage I read a lot of negative reviews and ran into some things it could not do which i felt I should be able to do for this task..but I can't remember now what it was, sorry. Maybe later I will after I spend time with it. it was only $29 and I'm not sorry for the purchase, it came with some instruments and sounds and downloadable content...its a bargain for that alone, plus I might yet find I like it.

[David Polich]

Well, I can tell you from experience what the problems with MainStage 2
are.

1, it doesn't play back audio tracks, so if you need to do that as well as
trigger VI's, forget about it.

2, it's always in edit mode. ALWAYS. So if you call up a "Concert" (MainStage speak for what Korg users would call a "Combi" and Yamaha users would call a
"Mix") and then move on to another one, even without doing anything to the
zones/splits/layers, you'll see the "Save" option active.

3, MainStage works by loading the VI's connected to each Concert. Here's where it gets dumb - say you have a Concert with 4 instances of
ES 2 (the "main synth" in MainStage). Then you create a new concert with
4 new instances of ES 2. You now have 8 instances of ES 2 running. It's not like DP's V-racks where you just have one rack loaded with the VI's you need
that can be accessed across multiple chunks. So do the math - if you have a
45 song set (not uncommon for a cover band), and each of the concerts has
an average of four VI's - you have 180 VI's loaded simultaneously.

4, I've had issues with MainStage taxing the hard drive on laptops. Launching it will cause the hard drive to spin more and heat up. You can hear the hard drive going like a fan. This may not be an issue on the latest
Mac laptops, particularly those equipped with SSD drives.

5, Apple's tech support for Logic and Main Stage is next to non-existent.

If I was going to simply host VI's for live shows, I'd go with Jambalaya,
no question. The live gigs I do call for playing back audio tracks and triggering a couple of VI's simultaneously, so I use DP for that, and it works great. Zones/splits/layers have to be done within the VI that you're
accessing (Kontakt, for instance) but it's not really a big deal.

[dewdman42]

This is a little out there, but just to round out this discussion a little bit, I will mention that this thread inspired me to try to see if I could get a few of the win32 programs mentioned to work on OSX and wine. I could not get the Forte demo to work but I did get Cantabile to work and its a very very nice program for this kind of stuff. I'm still not sure whether I would want to trust a wine based solution for gigging, but I'm going to play with it a while. If anyone wants help setting up Cantabile with wineskin on their mac, let me know and I will be glad to point you in the right direction. I was able to get low latency, 128 buffer, which is pretty good enough.

Some other windoz live hosting solutions I found out about, but haven't tried under Wine yet are something called Rack Performer, which appears to be in the beta stages still, the screen shots are seductive:

http://www.livefactory.com/products/rack-performer

And something else called BloXpander.

http://www.eareckon.com/en/products/blo ... mance.html

Back to native OSX...nobody has mentioned RAX yet, but I'm not even sure if that program is still being developed or what happened with it. I hardly hear anyone talking about it:

http://www.audiofile-engineering.com/rax/

Sorry, now back to our regular discussion about how to make DP work for all this kind of stuff.....

[dewdman42]

Regarding the free MIDI plugins I referenced earlier, I am unable to get them to work in DP8. Maybe someone else can figure it out and I'd love to hear how to make them work in DP. THey show up in the audio plugins preference and seem to pass examination. However they do NOT show up on any of the lists when attempting to assign them to a track. I have tried MIDI tracks, audio and instrument. Anyone have any idea about why they aren't showing up as available plugins to assign to tracks?

In any case, part of me is thinking that they will not work in DP for MIDI filtering unless they are provided as VST instrument plugins, which I don't think they currently are.

I wish DP would allow us to put VST plugins onto MIDI tracks(where audio is ignored), just for this kind of situation.

Anyway, if anyone is able to get this working on DP would love to hear about it.

[Dan Worley]

Regarding the free MIDI plugins I referenced earlier, I am unable to get them to work in DP8. Maybe someone else can figure it out and I'd love to hear how to make them work in DP. THey show up in the audio plugins preference and seem to pass examination. However they do NOT show up on any of the lists when attempting to assign them to a track...

They misght be 32-bit plugs and if they are they won't show up when DP is running in 64-bit. Boot with DP in 32-bit and see if they show up.

[dewdman42]

Yea I am still using 32bit mode already

[stubbsonic]

Back to native OSX...nobody has mentioned RAX yet, but I'm not even sure if that program is still being developed or what happened with it. I hardly hear anyone talking about it: ....

I bought Rax a few years ago for a tour and had a mixed experience. I actually liked the program very much. Simple, flexible and intuitive, it was just what I needed BUT... it was kind of broken. Something about running it with NI's Kontakt broke the way faders control volume. I then discovered that this had been a bug for a while, support was terrible. The developer stopped supporting the software long-ago, but that hasn't stopped them from selling it for $79. I suppose if you don't use Kontakt, you could try the demo. I think $79 is a bit much for broken and unsupported software.

[daniel.sneed]

How are you able to scroll between sequences with a foot controller? Can you please elaborate?

Some of the magic in DP lies in Command Window.
You can set any MIDI event, from any controller, to switch to a sequence inside a DP project.
Repeat for every sequence and there you are
So, any MIDI foot controller will do.

BTW, it takes loading VIs and FX time, which does vary.

[magicd]

How are you able to scroll between sequences with a foot controller? Can you please elaborate?

Some of the magic in DP lies in Command Window.
You can set any MIDI event, from any controller, to switch to a sequence inside a DP project.
Repeat for every sequence and there you are
So, any MIDI foot controller will do.

BTW, it takes loading VIs and FX time, which does vary.

Using V-Racks eliminates wait time when switching between chunks.

Dave

[Todzilla]

I love DP and have some ambivalence toward Mainstage, but I have to offer some contradictory feedback to this post.

Well, I can tell you from experience what the problems with MainStage 2
are.

1, it doesn't play back audio tracks, so if you need to do that as well as
trigger VI's, forget about it.

I play back audio tracks often on Mainstage. I start every song with an audio count in click (routed to dedicated outputs). Not sure what the confusion is here.

2, it's always in edit mode. ALWAYS. So if you call up a "Concert" (MainStage speak for what Korg users would call a "Combi" and Yamaha users would call a
"Mix") and then move on to another one, even without doing anything to the
zones/splits/layers, you'll see the "Save" option active.

I just switch to Performance mode and this isn't an issue. As much as I love DP, every time I open a project and play it, DP assumes that's a change and prompts me to see if I want to save it.

3, MainStage works by loading the VI's connected to each Concert. Here's where it gets dumb - say you have a Concert with 4 instances of
ES 2 (the "main synth" in MainStage). Then you create a new concert with
4 new instances of ES 2. You now have 8 instances of ES 2 running. It's not like DP's V-racks where you just have one rack loaded with the VI's you need
that can be accessed across multiple chunks. So do the math - if you have a
45 song set (not uncommon for a cover band), and each of the concerts has
an average of four VI's - you have 180 VI's loaded simultaneously.

...or if you use more advanced VIs than what's stock with a $29 plugin, you can have the VI set to switch patches itself. I do this with NI stuff, it works well and doesn't then require tons of instances loaded in advance.

4, I've had issues with MainStage taxing the hard drive on laptops. Launching it will cause the hard drive to spin more and heat up. You can hear the hard drive going like a fan. This may not be an issue on the latest
Mac laptops, particularly those equipped with SSD drives.

I think this is quite true, although running Mainstage in 64 bit mode with an SSD, it's less of a crush on processing and resulting heat than running DP is for me.

5, Apple's tech support for Logic and Main Stage is next to non-existent.

Can't argue there. Then again, I don't expect much for $29. The forums are full of pleas for help that go unresponded to. Not a lot of peer support for this app.

If I was going to simply host VI's for live shows, I'd go with Jambalaya,
no question. The live gigs I do call for playing back audio tracks and triggering a couple of VI's simultaneously, so I use DP for that, and it works great. Zones/splits/layers have to be done within the VI that you're
accessing (Kontakt, for instance) but it's not really a big deal.

What version of Mainstage do you use? seems like you're reference limitations that no longer exist.

All this said, I did have a scary instance of a problem in a rehearsal: Some patches only played the reverb sent portion, yielding a very low and soaking wet sound. This problem only occured once, using a Focusrite interface. When I used on board sound, the problem stopped, presumably because it was merging all outputs into a single stereo stream.

Hasn't happened since, but it really scares me that this could happen live. I have my controller (Roland RD300SX) all connected in as a digital piano, with the fader on zero. If anything ever fails mid-gig, I can throw the fader up and play piano the rest of the show.